To fly, fight and win in the 21st century.(Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley)(Speech)

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Remarks at the Air Force Association's Air and Space Conference and Technology Exposition, Washington, Sept. 26, 2007

Thank you. Mike (retired Lt. Gen. Michael Dunn), I appreciate that warm introduction and a career-long friendship as well. General Dunn and I have had wonderful opportunities to operate alongside each other in a variety of places, from Geneva to Pyongyang to Eglin and Langley and a variety of other places. My friend, you're in the right place at the right time and I appreciate it. Thank you for that introduction.

And thanks again for the entire Air Force Association for the great work you have done this week that you do everyday for Airmen and that you continue to do. These conferences are powerful, not only because they bring friends together, to reunite friendships or to make new friendships but they also give us a wonderful opportunity and a vehicle to learn to share, to grow, to argue, to conclude, to think, just time well-spent. We all value this opportunity and these opportunities and cherish the exceptional relationship that the United States Air Force and the Air Force Association have had for more than 60 years, so Mike and Association, thank you.

Secretary Wynne, General (.Duncan) McNabb, General (Frank) Klotz, senior leadership, General (Norton) Schwartz is here all the way from the cornfields out in the Midwest, Chief MSgt. of the Air Force (Rodney) McKinley, senior civilian and military, civic leaders from around the country, AFA chapter members, DVs, and I was going to say my wife Jenny but I don't see her over there, but I'll say that anyway. She will ask some of you if I said that, and so I did. Before I get into the meat of what I want to share with you I want to begin today with a topic that's near and dear to my heart about publicly acknowledging an outstanding leader within our U.S. Air Force.

A couple of years ago we began presenting the Senator Ted Stevens Award to a numbered air force commander that has demonstrated the most outstanding leadership in the past year meeting a variety of challenges. And Sen. Stevens was not picked just in random because he is a senior senator of the United States, but because as a young man, as a lieutenant, he flew C-46s over the "Hump" for months and months and months, out of India across the Himalayas into China and back, supplying efforts of 14th Air Force operating against hostiles inside China. So Senator Stevens is an Airman, he is one of us, and so we offer an award in his name for that leadership and that commitment. And I'm proud to announce today that this year's award for outstanding leadership goes to the commander of 2nd Air Force, Maj. Gen. Mike Gould. Mike, would you please come up?

General Gould's leadership has been instrumental in preparing our Airmen for their highly technical jobs and for ensuring that our Airmen deployed to the Middle East in our "in lieu of' tasking" duties are ready for the combat environment that they will face. We're sending these young Airmen, these young women and men, to perform non-traditional roles and in many cases, driving trucks and manning gun turrets for convoys alongside our Marine and Army brothers and sisters. General Gould makes these Airmen as prepared as we can possibly make them to defend themselves and to represent us proudly, and that's across the Total Force--Guard, Reserve, and active. And along the way, his leadership has touched just about every career field and every functional. His leadership has been invaluable in adding credibility to the concept of reachback, preparation and training. So my friend, thank you for your outstanding leadership, for your great service to the Air Force and the nation, for all you've done for these Airmen. There's an unknown number of lives you've saved, not only Airmen, but also Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen by the training that you've provided. Ladies and gentlemen, there couldn't be a better numbered air force commander in the Air Force today to receive this award than Maj. Gen. Mike Gould.

As I begin my third year as Chief of Staff in partnership with Secretary Wynne, I see the nation and our Air Force at a strategic inflection point, a watershed, so to speak, in our history. Yet you'd hardly know from the things we see or read in the media to the extent that the public focuses on national security and the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be only center stage. I would offer to you that such target fixation ignores the realities of the bigger world that we live in. if we focus solely on this tactical piece of Iraq and Afghanistan or fixate solely on providing expedient tactical solutions, we put our nation's security in danger. Instead we must open, I believe, our apertures and see the larger issues that concern us. We must consider strategic issues and develop long-term plans to address and solve these challenges. A week ago we marked the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force becoming a separate service with a specific mission: to deliver decisive effects through the third dimension of air.

So as we reflect on these 60 years and 100 years of military aviation, to me these anniversaries are occasions for both celebration as well as reflection; for pride and introspection. Last night at the Smithsonian, most of us here enjoyed not only a wonderful show sponsored by Northrop Grumman and some very, very talented people that wear the uniform as musicians in the U.S. Air Force, but along the path that we walked following the musicians and the band and the show, you walked by Gen. Billy Mitchell's personal aircraft, Spad. He flew that airplane in combat in World War I, but before he had that airplane, he was the first American officer to fly in combat in uniform. He was the first American officer to command aerial units in combat. …

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